Movies Online

Your grand kids bought you a computer, and you know it's possible to watch movies on your computer.

Where should you start?

Most of the action these days is at Netflix and iTunes. Some "leaders" and "followers" are listed below:

Market Leaders:

1. Netflix will send you DVDs plus online movies by subscription.
2. Apple's iTunes lets you rent or buy movies, TV, podcasts and music videos. They have a site here where you can view movie trailers.
3. YouTube has more than cute cat videos. Check out their movies site.
4. Amazon's Prime service offers movies as part of a subscription service called Prime. Or you can rent them individually on their web site.
5. Hulu offers movies, TV and more.

Others:

1. CinemaNow from BestBuy
2. DishTV/Blockbuster Total Access - if you're a subscriber of DishTV, they plan to offer streaming movies via satellite. Blockbuster was acquired by Dish in April of 2011.
3. Vudu has lots of movies, TV and more. They're owned by Walmart
4. Joost is still around but not thriving
5. Real Networks has some reality television programming
6. Asian movie specialty site TigerCinema is worth a look if you love Asian movies
7. Hard to find/non-mainstream movies are found at EZTakes and MovieFlix

ABC, NBC, CBS, FoxTV and other networks carry their programming on their web sites, and in the case of ABC, have an iPad application worth seeing.

Here's a recent review of some of these sites.

There are a few software programs and hardware devices for your living room that let you watch online video from many of the sources above. Boxee and Roku are two examples. You either install the software on your computer or your buy a device and it pulls the video in from the sources above to make it easy to play on your living room television. Connecting the Internet to your television should be easy, but no one has figured it out yet. Apple has a device called AppleTV, Roku makes a device. Western Digital has a media player that's worth a look. Google, who owns YouTube is getting into movies and TV and trying to figure out how to make your living room devices work with Internet video through GoogleTV. Steve Jobs and Apple thoughts on televisions and computer/Internet integration can be found here.